Sanctuaries of Asklepios are well-known as centres of healing that gained momentum in the Hellenistic world. The shrines and their material culture provide excellent examples of ‘private' religious practices. Yet even these practices and the objects they produced occurred in the highly public environment. This is especially relevant for sanctuaries that became important urban spaces, such as the Asklepieia of Epidauros and Pergamon – despite their location outside the urban core. These spaces became urban microcosms that produced a wide variety of ritual practices and objects, operating at varying scales simultaneously and with the potential of communicating to a wide and varied audience over time.

Particularly rich are the objects that are related to the familial sphere that were placed in these sanctuaries. Families, local elites but also others, invested according to their means to make themselves and their lineage particularly visible within sacred space by erecting statues, accompanied by inscriptions. Whilst the motivation is not often transmitted, they were certainly meant to impact later viewers. Their content could be varied: some are directed at one generation (either to children, to parents or to siblings of the dedicants), others span several decades. This paper focuses on the agencies of these objects at Asklepieia and their capacity to generate a long-term family and polis narrative that spoke to later generations. Taken together, they created a temporal assemblage that afforded a sense of deep time, weaving together city, family and the divine.

Using case studies drawn from Asklepieia as at Epidauros and Pergamon, this paper thus examines ways that family-related (votive) objects traveled through time to create narratives of meaning and belonging between the urban communities and Asklepios at the (often rural) shrine. We argue that erecting these monuments in a sacred and urban microcosm effectively produced a timescape that would have been of vital importance to the legitimacy, authority and social histories of family, sanctuary and city.